


Light Up the Sky

by red_river



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-08
Updated: 2013-05-08
Packaged: 2017-12-10 20:13:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/789704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/red_river/pseuds/red_river
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Castiel came to him, it was a night with no stars. Six times Castiel found Sam in the darkness. Set in seasons four and five; Sam and Castiel relationship centric.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Watching the fourth season forward of Supernatural, my overwhelming impression was that Sam Winchester had been dealt a rotten hand. I quickly tired feeling like he never got the benefit of the doubt from anyone, even his brother, no matter how pure his intentions. I was particularly disappointed that he and Castiel never developed a strong friendship, as I think both characters could have benefited from that.
> 
> Consequently, this story will be a series of linked one-shots set primarily in the fifth season of Supernatural, tracing the development of Sam and Castiel's relationship from uncertainty to deep friendship. This isn't intended to be a pairing story in the traditional sense, but it is meant to draw as close to that line as possible without stepping over. I hope you enjoy reading.
> 
> Note: This chapter is set in season four.
> 
> Pairing: Castiel + Sam, light.

The first time Castiel came to him, it was a night with no stars.

Sam stood at the grimy window of a dingy hotel, resting his forehead and one hand against the rippled glass covered in greasy smudges from other hands, other foreheads, and stared out into the gloomy drizzle over the parking lot, the rain halos glowing around the streetlamps. Dean had walked off into that gloom hours ago in search of an angry drink—at least he’d been angry when he said it, the second to last thing he’d said to Sam before slamming the door on the darkness of the hotel room. Sam knew he hadn’t been meant to hear Dean’s very last words—but Dean hadn’t cared to wait until he was outside to mutter “Bloodsucking freak” under his scotch-soured breath, and that meant something, too.

It made Sam tired. Too tired to think about going out, after Dean or something else—too tired to get into bed and pull the covers up around his chin, to pretend he didn’t exist for a while. Too tired to do anything but stand at the window and stare out at the red blink of extinguishing taillights, the splash of tires in shallow puddles, waiting for a familiar figure to cut across the asphalt. But it had been hours, and the parking lot was still empty.

Sam turned to press the side of his head against the windowpane, closing his eyes to the raindrops glistening on the other side of the glass. His thoughts hammered inside his head like a furious pulse, and for a moment it felt like the whole room was throbbing around him, a giant amplifier wishing Dean back here—yelling at him, ignoring him, throwing a bottle, whatever—but just here, not lost somewhere out there in the dark, untouchable. Sam banged his head lightly against the window. Then there was something, a tiny shift, some warmth in the air or a flicker of the moth-eaten curtains, and there was a voice in the nothingness behind him.

“I’m here,” Castiel said, as though he were expected.

Sam opened his eyes and whirled from the window, his shoulders tensing with the sudden presence at his back. Castiel was watching him from the middle of the room, still as stone, his face a mosaic of light and shadows. The angel’s stark blue eyes locked on Sam’s the instant he turned. Sam flattened his palm against the cold, oily window, pulling his bottom lip between his teeth as he returned the stare of this being he barely knew yet—this being who had hesitated even to shake his hand.

“Castiel.” Sam’s voice choked him as it rose in his throat, hesitation dangling inside his trachea. He rubbed his neck with an absent hand. “What, um—what are you doing here?” Then he heard the words in his own ears, tinny as if from a great distance, and he added in a fumble, “Dean’s not here—he’s out, uh, getting wasted—”

“I’m not here for Dean,” Castiel cut him off.

The angel moved with his purposeful strides across the room, each footfall echoing as if he were crossing the length of a cathedral instead of a hole-in-the-wall hotel room with flypaper stuck to the ceiling vent. He came to a stop just in front of Sam; Sam thought he might have taken a step back, if he wasn’t already pressed against the window. He felt like he ought to say something to his unexpected visitor, but his tongue was dead in his mouth—so he just stood still and waited, his expression half attentive and half wary as Castiel seemed to stare right through him, pinning him to the warped glass like an insect in a display case. Then the angel shook his head.

“I heard your prayer,” he said.

Sam felt a few wrinkles gathering on his forehead, confusion and an edge of defensiveness igniting his words once again. “I wasn’t praying,” he told the angel, not sure a moment later whether that might be somehow insulting.

Castiel pressed his lips together. “No. I suppose it was more like… pleading. I heard you, that’s what matters.”

Sam opened his mouth to verify that the angel could hear his thoughts, to ask why he’d been listening, maybe to tell him off for being in his head, the way Dean would have—but his tongue got away from him, and instead he heard himself asking, “And you came?”

Sam knew what he was in the eyes of the angels. He had no delusions about that. They had made it clear—Uriel especially—that his voice was not welcome in their ears anymore, if it ever had been. Knowing what he knew now about himself and Azazel, about the blood in his veins, Sam had to wonder—all these years, praying every day, and maybe no one had been listening from the very beginning. He gritted his teeth to hold back the sting.

“I came,” was all Castiel said, making it sound simple in a way Sam would not understand for a long time.

The drizzle had dried up into a thick mist, blotting out all but the glow of the streetlights below them, pinpricks of diffused light holding steady like harbor buoys in the fog. The sidewalk was still deserted. Sam watched it for a long moment before turning back to Castiel and shaking his head, the damp strands of his hair clinging to each other as they brushed condensation from the window.

“Thanks, Castiel.” He couldn’t bring himself to say Cas, Dean’s nickname for the angel, which seemed somehow too demeaning and too familiar all at once. The thought of Dean made him shiver. Sam dropped his head back against the glass, the cold night rippling through him and making his bones ache. He swallowed hard. “But I don’t think there’s much you can do.” Not unless you can take me back to a time when my brother didn’t want to rip my guts out, he added in his head.

Castiel gave him a quizzical look, and Sam wondered suddenly if the angel was still monitoring his thoughts, and how loudly the guilt and pain that were clenching in his stomach like an ulcer had come through. But he just said, “I have not come to do anything, Sam. I have only come to offer you comfort.”

The words sounded strange, coming from Castiel—an Angel of the Lord, almost a complete stranger, a stranger he only knew because of Dean—Dean’s rescuer, Dean’s ally, Dean’s guardian angel. Not Sam’s. The only connection Sam had to the quiet, intense man standing a foot from him was a person in a bar somewhere, clutching the neck of a green-glass bottle, trying to drink Sam away. Sam could almost taste the foam of the beer that was erasing him. It made his stomach twist.

“I’m fine,” he said, sucking in a deep, shadowy breath. He felt dizzy and dehydrated, slightly off balance—he’d hoped the long inhale would take the edge off but somehow it just made everything worse, especially the nausea, and he slumped against the window, the crossbars digging into his back as he stared into Castiel’s unreadable eyes. “I’m fine, I’m just a little tired.”

Castiel shifted, analyzing Sam’s face feature by feature. “Tired of what?” he asked, like he knew the answer.

Sam rubbed a hand across his forehead. “Of thinking and fighting and… and standing in the dark, waiting for Dean to come back,” he finished in a whisper. Part of him wanted to say waiting for Dean to come home, the way he always had when he was little, when the revolving cast of hotels was always home, because that was where he was and where his father and Dean always came back to. But nowhere felt like home anymore. Not this dark hotel room with cold beds and all their clothes still in duffel bags, the dresser drawers untouched. Not wherever Dean was, staring at his upside-down reflection in unleaded glass. Certainly nowhere inside of Sam.

He was pretty sure he hadn’t been home for Dean in a long time.

“Sam,” Castiel said.

The angel’s voice broke through his reverie, and Sam looked back at him, away from the parking lot. Castiel held his hands out at his sides, palms up, and took a last step forward until they stood toe to toe, gazes locked. The angel shook his head.

“He’ll come back, Sam.”

Sam wanted to laugh, but it morphed into a choke in his throat.

“He will,” Castiel repeated, more firmly. Then he raised one hand and pressed his fingers into the dark circles under Sam’s eyes, and his touch was so warm, compared to the window, that Sam didn’t even pull away—just flinched a little as the pale fingers slipped from his cheekbone and fell back to their master’s side. Castiel studied his face. “You need rest. You haven’t been sleeping.”

Sam shook his head, his hair whispering against the wet glass. “I can’t,” he breathed. “I can’t fall asleep until Dean gets back.” He swallowed hard. “I never can.”

“I know,” Castiel said, and it sounded like he did, though Sam didn’t know how the angel could possibly know all these things. “I told you—I’ve come to offer you comfort. I can help you.”

Castiel held his hands out again, just a little higher, and suddenly Sam realized that it wasn’t pacification, it was an offer—to collapse forward into Castiel’s arms, into folds of beige polyester and white cotton and wings, whatever color they were. An offer to fall. Sam looked up at his divine intruder and managed an almost smile.

“I didn’t think you were that kind of angel,” he said.

Castiel tipped his head. “Even I can do this much.”

Sam closed his eyes and let himself go.

He wasn’t expecting anything—half of Sam believed that Castiel would disappear from right in front of him, leaving him to plummet to the dark floor. The other half was afraid the angel had never been there at all. But Castiel caught him tightly, wrapped his arms around Sam and held him up as if he weighed nothing, as if he were pressing a feather into the folds of his coat. All at once Sam was warm again, every inch of his skin, all the way down to his bones, and the tension in his stomach and his head had vanished, replaced by a strange, soft impression of movement, as though he were floating a few inches up without his feet ever leaving the ground. He kept his eyes closed, so he couldn’t be sure, but as Castiel held Sam to him the young hunter felt like the angel was glowing, or he was, a gentle yellow glow that ate away at his edges until he was melting into Castiel, disintegrating, all of the rust and the roughness and the scars scraped from his skin.

Sam laid his head sideways onto Castiel’s shoulder, surrendering to the angel’s hold. He liked that feeling—of disintegrating. But what he liked most was the warmth, the beautiful yellow light racing through him, humming in the arms wrapped tight around his body. Sam wished he could keep that light inside of him for the rest of his life—somehow it felt like something he’d been searching for a very long time.

“Rest,” Castiel whispered in his ear.

Sam’s body went limp, his legs buckling and collapsing toward the floor. Castiel swept him up easily, tucking one arm under Sam’s knees and the other around his back, and carried the tall young man effortlessly to the first of the two stiff beds. In his arms, Sam felt like a child, a little boy who had fallen asleep in the car and was being carried into the house; at least, he decided, this was how he would want that to feel, if he had ever known a house, or remembered being carried up the stairs half-dreaming.

Castiel laid him gently down into the pillows and off-white sheets, drawing the rumpled hotel coverlet over his legs with one hand—Sam had the other, and he was reluctant to let go, gripping the angel’s sleeve with feeble, lethargic fingers. Castiel made no attempt to pull away.

“Thank you,” Sam murmured into the darkness, feeling the scratch of the angel’s coat against his palm. He opened his eyes for a fraction of a second, long enough to find Castiel leaning over him, perfectly still, before they slipped closed again, giving in to the beautiful, quiet darkness inside his head. “Thank you, Cas. Castiel.” There was no answer, and Sam struggled to blink again, suddenly desperate to know the angel was still there. But a soft hand covered his eyes, and his anxiety disappeared in an instant, replaced by the flood of yellow light.

“Rest,” Castiel repeated.

As he spiraled into sleep, Sam felt the angel vanish from his side, gone without a sound. But the light stayed with him, and it gave Sam peaceful dreams—not of Dean, or of Ruby or Lilith, of demons or angels or Heaven or Hell—only of summer sunlight and steady arms, and the flutter of vast white wings.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgot to mention in the last chapter that this story is named for one of my image songs, "Light Up the Sky" by The Afters. The image song for this chapter in particular is "Believe" by Dave Barnes.
> 
> Note: This chapter is set after 5.02, "Good God, Y'all," when Dean and Sam have gone their separate ways.

It was dark again, the next time Castiel found him. Six months that felt like a thousand years had brought Sam to the rooftop of the bar in a tiny Oklahoma town, the only heart beating in the midnight darkness, staring up at the stars and down at the small swell of city lights, the dry wind playing through his hair. A few feet away, nestled into the gravel that took the place of shingles on the flat concrete roof, an open bottle of beer sat near the access door, still full to the neck. Sam hadn’t wanted a drink—it just felt strange not to pop a bottle cap at night, not to be haunted by the familiar smell of cheap malt and copper. And Dean wasn’t there to do it.

Sam rocked back and forth on his heels, feeling the gravel crunch under his feet, a tiny sound like seashells breaking. It had been more than two weeks since he and Dean had parted ways, since he had walked away from that ketchup-stained picnic table with his backpack and Dean’s words ringing in his head. I spend more time worrying about you than doing the job right. Sam felt his lips twitch into a parched smile. He rocked forward onto the balls of his feet and stared over the edge of the roof half a foot in front of him, down at the empty parking spaces and the glitter of streetlamps on asphalt, the reflected light so dim from three stories up. He wondered when worrying about him had become something that got in Dean’s way. Then again, it seemed like all he did was get in Dean’s way recently.

But hadn’t that been the point? Wasn’t that why he was standing on this roof and Dean was somewhere else—he didn’t know where, couldn’t bring himself to ask Bobby, couldn’t bring himself to call. A car was moving on a distant highway—Sam could just see its headlights tracking across the black horizon—and he knew it wasn’t the Impala, because the Impala wasn’t going to be on his horizon again for a long time, if ever. But all the same he leaned forward onto his tiptoes, trying to find its shape against the dark blue sky.

“What are you doing?”

Sam didn’t hear the whisper of wings before that voice reached out to him from the darkness at his back. He turned his head. Castiel had appeared between him and the roof door, little more than a silhouette cut into the deeper shadows. He wore a grave expression, but Sam couldn’t help the small smile that rose to his own lips.

“Hey, Cas.”

The angel stood his ground for a long moment, only the flaps of his coat moving as the prairie wind brushed past them, setting Sam back onto his heels. Then Castiel moved forward until he drew even with the young man, and in the pinprick glow of the stars and the city lights Sam could see that those severe blue eyes were fixed on his face, looking as ever a little desperate and more than a little resigned.

“What are you doing?” he asked again.

Sam didn’t know how he should answer that question. Repenting seemed like something you couldn’t just say, not to an angel. He kicked his foot in the gravel and listened as a few pieces tumbled over the edge of the roof, disappearing for a second before they hit the asphalt and echoed across the parking lot, tiny ripples that seemed too loud in the still air. Castiel watched him impassively. Sam shrugged and stared up at the white trail of an airplane splitting the black velvet sky.

“Just looking at the stars,” he replied at last.

Castiel shifted in his stance, his gaze traveling the six inches between Sam’s shoes and the edge of the roof. “Why up here?” he pressed.

Sam wondered suddenly if Castiel had seen a lot of people in places like this—in the space between sturdy ground and thin air, between breathing and falling. Then he wasn’t sure again; now that he’d met a few, he sort of doubted angels really did that, hovered around lost souls. Well, except this one.

Sam shook his head. “It’s been a long time since you came by at night,” he said instead of answering. A handful of memories flitted through his mind, soft and fleeting as butterfly wings—half a dozen times over the last months when he had jolted out of a troubled sleep to the rustle of departing wings, his nightmares banished by the passing touch of warm yellow light, or felt a cool hand close his eyes when sleep was otherwise out of reach. But Castiel had never said anything to him—not since the first time, since the embrace that had started to feel, some nights when Sam lay on his mattress on the floor and stared up at the dark ceiling, like a beautiful dream instead of a memory. A dream that had ended, abruptly, when he let Lucifer out of the pit and he and Dean walked in opposite directions.

And suddenly Dean was there again in his head, always the same memory catching him painfully off guard: Dean’s tired eyes, his coldness that drained all the sunlight out of a warm afternoon, his bloodless surrender. Dean who couldn’t deal with him—didn’t want to. The long ride in a hundred different cars, hitchhiking nowhere, anywhere, rocking over every pothole and back road clutching his phone in his lap, his knuckles white around the black plastic. Dean hadn’t called once in seventeen days.

Something shriveled inside of Sam at the memory, like yellowed paper crumpling in his rib cage. He wrapped his arms across his stomach. “Anyway, it’s just… it’s been a while.”

Castiel nodded once, his lips pressed together into a flat line. Then the angel broke his long silence, and his words surprised Sam enough that Dean’s image flickered out of his mind, taking the sickening clench in his stomach with it.

“Yes, I know.” Castiel hesitated, the breeze brushing his coat against the backs of Sam’s knees. “I wasn’t sure you would want to see me.”

Sam turned his head to meet the angel’s eyes, his gaze scouring Castiel’s face in disbelief. “Me not want to see you?” Castiel simply nodded again. Sam reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “Don’t you have that backwards?”

Castiel’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Why wouldn’t I want to see you, Sam?”

Sam’s arms slumped back to his side, and he exhaled slowly, trying to breathe out the tension around his lungs. He looked out at the scatter of white city lights, unwilling to watch the angel’s face as he spoke. “Well, for one thing, I started the freaking apocalypse,” he said, his voice breaking over a little laugh. The pieces got stuck in his throat, sharp as slivers of glass.

He tried not to think it, but the thought crept into his mind anyway: if his own brother couldn’t stand to look at him, how much truer would that be for an angel, even one who had rebelled? He kept his eyes on the sky.

Castiel remained silent, his gaze following Sam’s out over the sleeping city, the rough shapes of houses and stores clustered together, and farther out the single lights of farmhouses suspended in the vast darkness, like the lights of distant ships sailing alone through a midnight sea. Then Sam felt the ghost of a touch against his back; the angel’s hand had settled there, so lightly that Sam wondered if the soft breeze would be enough to brush it away.

“You are not the only one who needs to be forgiven, Sam,” Castiel after a long time. There was a tightness around his eyes and at the corners of his lips that Sam hadn’t seen before, couldn’t read. The angel sighed under his breath. “The fault is not yours alone.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked before he could stop himself. “I broke the final seal, remember?” He tried to shrug, but the air felt too heavy for that—or maybe it was his shoulders that had gotten heavy.

Castiel pressed his lips together. “I was the one who released you from the panic room.”

Sam’s head whipped around to seek out Castiel’s eyes; Castiel exchanged a fleeting look with him, then pulled his gaze back to the darkness, his expression perturbed—with himself, Sam realized suddenly. It was such an unexpected, human expression that it made Sam laugh, just a brief flare of sound that echoed across the roof and brought the angel’s curious gaze back to his face. Castiel’s eyebrows drew together, as if he were trying to decide whether Sam was laughing at him; Sam shook his head and let his laughter die away to a slight, self-deprecating smile.

“That’s not your fault, Cas. You were just…” The angel looked at him, waiting—for absolution or an argument, Sam couldn’t decide—but in the end the young hunter only shook his head again, the gravel crunching under his feet as he shifted. “Anyway… I had a chance to turn back even after that, so… it’s not on you, all right?”

Something clawed at Sam’s stomach as the words left his mouth, and the air tasted like smoke in their aftermath—but there was relief, somehow, in the pain, a spark deep inside that made him want to say it again. It took Sam a moment to realize that the relief was just from finally saying it—getting the words out, confessing aloud the litany that had been searing through his mind ever since he’d watched the final seal shatter under his feet. Dean hadn’t wanted to hear it—not even his guilt or his apology.

“It’s my fault Lucifer’s walking around up here,” he said, to hear someone say it.

Castiel turned beside him, the weight of his gaze urging Sam to face him; Sam kept his eyes on the black horizon. The plane was gone now, but its trail was still pressed into the sky like a seam or a scar, so white it was hard to believe it would ever heal. He felt Castiel’s fingers curl into the back of his jacket.

“All of Heaven and Hell wanted Lucifer free, Sam. Yours were just the hands they chose.”

Sam bowed his head, tucking his chin against his chest so Castiel wouldn’t see the quiver in his jaw. He found himself staring down at the parking lot once more, the cracked paint of the faded yellow lines, the streetlights glistening beyond his wet eyelashes. The ground looked so far away it might have been a mile down instead of three stories.

“They were still my hands,” he murmured.

Castiel did not reply. Sam could feel that piercing gaze on his face, though he refused to lift his head and meet the angel’s eyes. Then Castiel took half a step toward him, standing so close that Sam could feel the angel’s breath on his cheek.

“You have not forgiven yourself for this because your brother has not forgiven you.”

Dean’s angry, cold, tired features flitted through Sam’s mind again. He closed his eyes on the view of unsteady pavement. “They’re not things that can be forgiven, Cas.”

Not even by angels, he added in his head.

For a moment there was no sound in the world—Sam said nothing and neither did Castiel; there was not a car alarm or a hum of tires or the delayed roar of an airplane overhead to break the stillness. Then the wind lifted in a shudder across the rooftop, hard enough this time that it rocked Sam forward on his feet—and suddenly Castiel’s arm was all the way behind his back, gripping him so tightly that Sam’s eyes blinked open in surprise. He only had the briefest glimpse of Castiel’s grim expression before the angel swung Sam toward him and pressed the tall young man into his tan coat, as close as their forms allowed. Sam stared into the darkness over his shoulder as Castiel’s second arm enfolded him, too, anchoring him securely against the angel’s body.

“Be careful, Sam,” Castiel whispered into his ear. “You’re closer to the edge than you think.”

The sudden movement had knocked one of the tears loose from Sam’s eyes; it slid down his cheek and tumbled into the shoulder of the trench coat, disappearing in its folds. Sam dug his fingers into the thick fabric. Then he bent and pressed his face into Castiel’s neck, willing himself to make that the last one, not to leave traces of salt against the angel’s skin.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled into Castiel’s shoulder, not sure himself what the apology was for.

Castiel tightened his hold on Sam. For a minute he said nothing, just stood still and held him, a presence in the dark, letting Sam breathe in and out against his neck. Then he raised one hand to cradle the back of Sam’s head, his fingers twining through strands of dark hair.

“Shh,” he said, the single syllable sharp and abrupt in the silence.

Sam blinked and lifted his face just a little from the angel’s skin, a few more tears escaping to flicker down his cheeks. “What?” he croaked.

Castiel shifted his weight, the way he always did when he was unsure of something. “It is a sound made to soothe someone,” he told Sam, his hands a little stiff against the planes of the young hunter’s back. “It was in a book.”

The doubt and solemnity in his words made Sam want to smile, in spite of the tightness in his chest and the emptiness of the roof and the untouched bottle of beer—in spite of everything. He turned his head a little against Castiel’s shoulder, and put his arms around the angel’s back, too, doing his part to hold them together. “Yeah…” he started, then broke off, trying to decide how to explain. “It’s just—it’s kind of longer, like, shhhhh…”

“Shhhh, shhhh,” Castiel repeated, his rendition still a little off, a little too fast.

Sam buried his smile in the angel’s neck. “Shhhhhh…”

They stayed that way for a long time, Castiel holding Sam against him and hushing him imperfectly, Sam’s eyes closed and his face tucked against his companion’s skin, savoring the feeling of yellow light he’d been hoping, praying, was not just a fading dream. The warmth was so penetrating that Sam almost fell asleep right there on Castiel’s shoulder. When at last he came back to himself, out of the beautifully empty folds of his mind, his tears had evaporated, and Castiel had fallen silent, the glow of his grace never faltering.

Sam breathed out against the angel’s neck, his hands relaxing slightly in the folds of his friend’s coat. “I missed you, Cas,” he admitted to the darkness, staring out at a sky full of stars, the last wisps of the airplane trail disintegrating into the spaces between them. Castiel tightened his hold and Sam sighed, the hint of a laugh catching in his voice. “I was sort of afraid you wouldn’t come anymore. Since you’re Dean’s angel.”

“I am God’s angel,” Castiel told him.

“No, I just meant…”

Sam broke off as Castiel pushed him gently back, worried for an instant that he had offended the angel and he was about to be alone on the rooftop—but Castiel only pulled away until he could meet Sam’s eyes, and then he stopped, holding the young man by the shoulders.

“I will always come to you, Sam.”

There was something stuck in Sam’s throat again, so thick that it was impossible to swallow, almost impossible to breathe. He couldn’t decide if it was a wonderful feeling or not. For a long moment he stared into Castiel’s eyes, feeling his lungs shaking in his chest with the effort of saying or not saying something, inhaling or not inhaling. Then he leaned forward and buried his face in the angel’s shoulder once more, closing his eyes against all the different kinds of darkness. Castiel’s arms enclosed him without question.

“You don’t have to do that,” Sam told him.

Castiel shook his head. “But I will.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is set after 5.04, "The End," when Dean and Sam have reunited.

Castiel always came in the dark.

In the long-stale shadows of a one-night motel room, Sam lay awake against the scratch of starched sheets and stared at the cracked ceiling, listening to Dean snoring in the next bed. From the bathroom the feeble wheeze of the fan stirred the too-warm air; beyond the windows, semi-trucks rumbled endlessly down the interstate, their headlights breaking through the half-drawn curtains and splashing the walls white, whirling like searchlights. On the nightstand between their beds, plastic cups of flat Coke and melting ice rattled like loose teeth with each passing roar.

Sam stretched his long legs, sore from so many hours folded up in a small car, until his toes dangled over the end of the short bed. He let his head flop over on the pillow, staring at his sleeping brother through a few strands of brown hair. Dean had been out like a light the second he hit the mattress, never one to miss his beauty sleep. Sam had lain awake for an hour already and felt no closer to drifting off.

Sam curled one elbow under his head, scooting one way and then the other, but nothing felt comfortable. Maybe it was the room—hot and airless as a tired furnace, and too close to the highway, the reverberation of carriage after carriage of thirty-four tires slicking asphalt only a few hundred feet beyond their windows—sensations that had faded in Garber, Oklahoma, even if he never really forgot them. Maybe it was Dean’s snoring, another sound he hadn’t heard in over three weeks. Or maybe it was just being here again—in a cheap motel, in the bed next to Dean’s, his ears still throbbing to the beat of classic rock wailing from the outdated radio, which Dean had kept on until the moment he tumbled into bed, leaving no room for silence or words between them. Maybe it was just that the last thing Dean had said to him all night was almost three hours old, just a simple question—Want a Coke?—before his brother slipped out for a walk to the gas station down the road, because there was no beer in the motel vending machine.

Sam rolled onto his back again, his hair spreading out against the bleached pillowcase, and tried not to read the glowing face of the digital clock, the hour back in the single digits now. He held his eyes closed for a long moment before they struggled open on their own. He wanted sleep—needed it, before getting back in the car at dawn for the drive to their reunion job, six more hours at least. But somehow he couldn’t get his mind off of Dean’s expression as they stood at the base of the dam, together for the first time in a month; the nervous tingle in his hands as he’d climbed into the Impala, a space he knew better than any room; Dean’s promise for a fresh start ringing in his ears—and not an hour later, trying to explain a shortcut on a state highway, an accordion map collapsing in his large hands, the twitch in his brother’s lips as Dean said, Yeah, no offense, Sam, but I’m not going to be taking directions from you anytime soon. The stinging in his throat that he couldn’t fight down, sour like car sickness—because Dean hadn’t forgiven anything, forgotten anything. Dean had decided he didn’t want to lose Sam, but he didn’t really want Sam back yet, either.

Sam blinked hard in the darkness, fighting down the thick feeling in his mouth. It didn’t matter, he told himself, not for the first time since kicking away the covers. Dean was lying right there, four feet away from him. His backpack was stuffed into the Impala’s trunk, a smudge of deep red dust the only proof it had ever been anywhere else. All the rest could come in time. He told himself that, but somehow he still couldn’t sleep.

Sam threw an arm over his eyes, catching the tear on his cheek before it could roll down into the pillowcase. He pressed his face hard into the crook of his elbow, and the pressure soothed the prickle behind his eyes, but it did nothing for the ache in the center of his chest, a slow collapse like he was missing a rib. It was the Dean ache, and nothing ever got rid of it except forgetting for a little while.

Another tear slipped past his arm and escaped into his hair, the saltwater itching on his skin. Sam squeezed his eyes shut. Please just let me sleep, he begged himself, or anyone else who was listening. I don’t want to think about this. I can’t fix this. I just want to sleep. Please. Please.

“Please,” he whispered aloud to the silent room.

The hum of the fan hid the rustle of familiar wings.

“Sam.”

Sam jolted up in the dark, sitting up fully from the tangled sheets and blinking the pressure spots away from his eyes. “Cas?” he asked in a croak, the fingers of one hand digging into the resilient mattress as his eyes swept across the room. A truck growled in the distance and its headlights raced along the mottled walls; Castiel appeared suddenly in the shadows between the dresser and the mini fridge, the fleeting light stark on his stern features, his eyebrows drawn slightly together in concern or contemplation. Then the truck was gone, and the image of the angel vanished with it—but Sam could feel his presence now, that meditative gaze fixed on his face through the thin illumination of far-off streetlamps. Sam sunk back into the bed, leaning on his elbows.

“Hey,” he whispered, swallowing against the dryness in his mouth.

Castiel moved forward with slow strides, silent as a shadow, and stepped into the corridor between their beds. He glanced once at Dean’s sleeping form—a cursory check for any disturbance caused by his arrival, Sam thought—before the angel’s attention returned to him. Castiel was backlit by the window and Sam couldn’t read his expression at all; he was momentarily embarrassed to be stretched out in shorts and a ratty Sooners t-shirt under divine scrutiny, his visitor eternally unchanged in a suit and trench coat. A sudden urge to explain welled up in his throat—that it was the only t-shirt Garber’s tiny general store had carried in his size, the day he spilled tomato sauce on his button-down and realized two shirts and a pair of fraying jeans were all he owned in the world—but before he could put the words together, Castiel spoke, his gravel voice almost lost in the noise of the fan.

“I came as soon as I could.”

Sam blinked up at him through the dead air, his eyelashes stiff from their brief brush with saltwater. Already the skin around his eyes felt too tight. “I wasn’t calling you, Cas,” he said, clearing his throat as quietly as he could. He rolled up onto his left elbow so that he could face the angel squarely, and his right hand drifted to cover his chest, the heel of his palm digging absently into his aching rib cage. “I was praying, kind of, but…”

Castiel tipped his head to one side. “Do you want me to leave?” he asked with typical bluntness.

Something flared under Sam’s hand at the question, a little spark of unease, but he crushed it down into his skin, looking across at Dean instead of Castiel as he searched for an answer. Dean snorted and rolled over and Sam swallowed something that went down hard. “I don’t want to wake him,” he murmured under his breath, risking a glance up at the angel.

Castiel took another step forward, the sweep of his trench coat obscuring Sam’s view of his sleeping brother. “I will not,” he assured the younger hunter, and even though Sam couldn’t see his face for the shadows he knew somehow that Castiel’s expression was earnest and far too serious. Sam fought down a small smile.

“I know, I just…”

He inhaled and held his breath for a long second, long enough to catch the glowing digits of the clock face out of the corner of his eye. He wondered what Castiel was normally doing at two thirty-six in the morning. Sam let the stale air go before it could burn his lungs.

“You don’t have to stay,” he said at last.

Castiel studied him for a moment without speaking. Sam dug his hand into his heart, bracing himself for the flutter of departing wings. But after uncountable heartbeats pressed into his palm through the thin cotton of the t-shirt, the angel seemed to make his choice, and he shifted in his stance, the lights of the passing semis raking over his back. The hands at his side smoothed imperceptible wrinkles from the slope of his tan overcoat.

“You’re traveling together again,” Castiel said.

Sam’s breath hitched on the inhale. Maybe it was the afterburn of cigarette smoke drifting through the room, a memento of other guests who had cared less about the scratched-up No Smoking sign on the back of the door. The lettering had worn away until Smoking was almost completely erased; every time Sam’s eyes had drifted to the sign, away from Dean’s face alight with the flicker of crap television, all he saw was the word No.

Sam exhaled carefully to get all of the smoke out. “Yeah, we are,” he replied, trying not to hear his own sigh.

Castiel nodded once. “This is what you wanted,” the angel continued.

Sam found he had to swallow again. He pressed his palms flat against the sheets. “Yeah, definitely,” he tried, cringing to hear the hollowness of those words echoing in his bones. He was sure Castiel could hear it, too. His will flagged and he lost the end of the sentence to a whisper. “No, it’s—it’s great. It’s perfect.”

Sam hung his head, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment before they lifted to Castiel once more. There was silence between them as he studied the silhouette of the angel towering over him; in the darkness he seemed immutable as stone and equally unreal, some figment of a dream that had risen from Sam’s mind to torture him with questions he didn’t want to think about. Then Castiel bent and very slowly lowered himself to sit on the edge of the bed, back straight but his face turned to Sam, startlingly real again as he braced his hands on either side of his spilling coat. Sam shuffled over on his awkward elbows to give the angel more room.

There was just enough light now to piece together Castiel’s thoughtful frown. “Then why have you been crying?” he asked.

Something lurched inside of Sam at the question, like there was a weight suspended in his chest and Castiel had yanked on the other end of the robe. Sam pressed hard against his missing rib and wished the pressure pain was as strong as whatever hurt on the inside.

“I’m not—um… it’s just…”

Sam shifted to wipe the salt away from his eyes, but Castiel beat him to it—the angel reached out and settled his left hand along the side of Sam’s face, the contact so light that Sam could barely feel anything but the warmth blazing in all five fingers. He held still and so did Castiel, not stroking his face but simply resting his thumb over the curve of Sam’s cheekbone, as if guarding the last traces of the tear on his skin. Sam studied the fuzzy image of Castiel’s hand out of the corner of his eye and then looked up, reluctantly meeting the angel’s gaze, those irises more black now than blue in the shadows. Castiel simply waited.

As last Sam closed his eyes. He resisted the urge to rub his throbbing temples, afraid of upsetting the angel’s hand—the touch felt too close to insubstantial already. His sigh got lost in the thrum of the fan. “It’s just… me and Dean,” he said. “We’re… we’re wrong.”

“Wrong,” Castiel repeated.

“We’re not… how we were before.”

Sam felt the words catch in his throat, and he had to cough to get them out. His eyes darted across the room with sudden terror that Dean would wake up and hear him, and they’d have to fight about this, too—but Dean was quiet in his bed, his mouth hanging open in careless unconsciousness. For a moment Sam just took him in, his pulse aching in his hollow chest. Then he glanced up at Castiel. The angel seemed to be listening intently, staring back into his eyes as though he were watching for the first glitter of tears. Sam blinked hard.

“We’re broken, Cas,” he told the angel, surprised by the rawness of his own voice. “Broken like… like I don’t think we’ve been before. I’m not sure we can put the pieces back together. But what scares the hell out of me is that… I’m not even sure if we should.” Sam swallowed against the darkness, feeling the shadows of doubt creep into his collapsing lungs. “I’m not sure together was really together, either.”

Castiel said nothing—just stared down at him with unfathomable eyes, his hand warm like an ember on Sam’s cheek, looking, as always, more through him than at him. Sam stared back until he couldn’t take the silence anymore.

“Um, Cas?” he prompted, clearing his throat lightly. “You still listening?”

Castiel bowed his head a little, shifting in his place on the edge of the mattress. “I’m sorry,” he said, a thread of discomfort weaving through his voice as his eyes lifted to search Sam’s face. “Could you repeat yourself, more slowly? I didn’t… follow that.”

Sam breathed out into a little laugh, shaking his head softly, as softly as if it were a butterfly and not an angelic hand perched on his cheek. “Sorry. I guess that was pretty tangled.”

“Yes,” Castiel told him frankly.

Sam’s lips twitched up into a half smile, but it only lasted a moment, fading steadily as he fought for words the angel would understand. Anything that was simple enough for Castiel was almost too simple, cut too directly to the center of the wound Sam had been circling, feeling out, but never looking at directly. He wedged the heel of his palm under his breastbone and pushed up until he felt his ribs creak.

“Dean just doesn’t… trust me. He’s angry at me,” Sam tried again, shaking his head as a sardonic smile twisted over his lips. “Not like it’s the first time, but…” He hesitated, then let his eyes drop, staring down into the furrowed sheets. Castiel’s hand was suddenly heavy on his face, and far too warm, like a brand searing into his skin, and Sam wished that touch would disappear, taking all his stifling thoughts with it. He made himself inhale. “The thing is, this time… I don’t think he’s angry with me for the things I’ve done. I think he’s just angry ’cause he finally realized I’m more trouble than I’m worth.”

Sam tried to keep his voice level, but the words came out hoarser than he’d intended, crackling in the air between them like static electricity. Castiel’s hand tensed against his cheek, a butterfly unfolding its wings to keep its balance.

“Why would you say that, Sam?”

His name caught him off-guard—Sam choked a little on a hard laugh. “I’m a grade-A screw-up, Cas,” he said, keeping the words simple this time. They burned like razors in his own ears. Castiel just stared down at him, his expression lost as ever, and suddenly Sam felt so heavy, like he was going to slip through the bed and plummet all the way down into the fire. He pulled his elbows in and let himself collapse onto his back, leaving Castiel’s hand deserted in the air as he sunk into the pillows. He inhaled through the cloud of fabric dust. “I’m a curse. I’ve wrecked everything I’ve ever touched. Mom and Jess and… Dean went to Hell for me and I still started the apocalypse. And now I’m…”

Sam looked up at Castiel’s fingers slowly closing over empty air, slowly retreating to the spread of his trench coat, and couldn’t make himself say it—because surely Castiel already knew that he was Lucifer’s vessel; because he couldn’t face another reaction like Dean’s, tired and distant, or the realization that he might be the only one who was actually afraid of this… because some part of him was terrified that if he said it, that name that was subversively becoming entangled with his, that Castiel would disappear from the side of his bed, banished by the specter of the devil. The headlights of the semis rolled over the room in great swaths of black and white, illuminating the angel hovering on his mattress, but Sam was too far down, and the light didn’t touch him.

Sam squeezed his eyes shut, and then wished he hadn’t—it just made the prickling behind them more intense.

“I think Dean just gets it now,” he said, a shiver racing through him in spite of the stifling air. It shook the tears behind his eyelids and Sam flopped his arm across his face again to hide his blurring vision. “He sees that I’m past saving. That I’m…” A word reverberated in his head—that word his brother had said three times, each repetition making Sam’s lips tremble. “I’m a monster,” he whispered.

The bed creaked a little, as though Castiel’s shoulders had slumped, or his wings shuddered down against his back. Sam kept his arm clamped over his eyes. For a moment the silence set in around him, deeper even than the midnight darkness. Then the air stirred, and he felt Castiel’s hand wrap around his wrist, the angel’s thumb pressed into his palm.

“Sam, look at me.” Castiel pulled his arm away from his face and held it down against the pillow, his fingers digging into the bones of the radius; Sam felt the breath of the fan cooling the tears on his cheeks, but he kept his eyes tightly closed. Something nestled into the sheets on the other side of his head, brushing the shoulder of his ragged red shirt. Castiel exhaled hard. “You are not a monster.”

Sam shook his head once, the motion so soft it made his neck ache. “Cas, it’s okay—I’m okay, honestly. You don’t have to lie to make me feel—”

“Look at me.”

The roughness of the angel’s voice startled Sam’s eyes open, chasing a tear down his cheek. Castiel was leaning over him, staring down at the young hunter from only a few inches up, his hands braced on either side of Sam’s head. Looking up at him Sam felt suddenly small, like a child, like the angel could have picked him up with one hand, crumpled him into a ball against his chest. Sam swallowed hard as Castiel’s shoulders relaxed, the angel hanging over him like a shadow.

“Sam,” he said simply.

For an instant Sam couldn’t see anything, his companion’s face losing all its features in the pitch-black room. Then the glow of headlights burst through the window like a symphony and exploded over Castiel, illuminating his whole body for one blinding moment, and the angel’s image burned into Sam’s blinking eyes—Castiel’s grave expression, his splayed hands, the pale fingers coiled around his wrist, the desperate sincerity in his intense blue eyes, staring down into Sam’s from so close that he could see his own dark reflection mirrored in them. Sam breathed in and the air shuddered in his chest like it was knitting his bones. Then the truck was gone, and the darkness poured over them again—but Sam could still see Castiel, every line of his face. He closed his eyes and let his breath go.

“Cas,” he whispered.

Other things rose up between them for a moment—Dean’s light snores and the whirr of the fan and the growl of passing semis, the drone of tires leaving black scars on the asphalt. Then Castiel’s coat rustled like a low sigh, and the bed rasped as the angel leaned forward a few inches and pressed their foreheads together, his breath suddenly warm on Sam’s face. Sam kept his eyes closed, his skin tingling as the salt tracks disappeared from his cheeks.

“You are no monster, Sam Winchester,” Castiel told him, the words less than a whisper. “You are not the best man I have ever known, but you try the hardest to be.”

The angel’s voice sent a shiver through him—but somehow the feeling was warm, and wonderful, and it made Sam feel light, like his skeleton had been replaced by hollow bird bones, like Castiel had cut the rope inside him and the weight in his chest had tumbled down into Hell without him. He wondered if it was Castiel’s grace he was feeling, wrapping around him like sunshine and making them both glow, or if this was just how it felt to have an angel’s breath on his cheek.

Castiel shook his head softly, brushing their skin together with each turn. “Every evil you have committed has been done in pursuit of good,” he said, a sliver of regret twisting in his voice. “I understand that… more than anyone.”

Sam’s eyes flickered open at last, gazing up into the angel’s face in the distant blush of streetlights, studying Castiel’s lips pressed tightly together, the self-reproach haunting his expression. Sam shook his head, too. Then he lifted one hand and rested it against the back of Castiel’s neck, his fingers loosely curled into the angel’s collar.

“Have you found God yet, Cas?”

Castiel closed his eyes, his body pressing down into Sam’s as if suddenly too heavy for his arms.

“I’ve found nothing.”

Sam nodded softly. Then he closed his eyes as well, and let Castiel rest against him, relaxing into the warmth of the angel’s touch and wondering which of them was leaning on the other.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the most tragic aspects of Sam's character, in my mind, is how deeply self-reproachful he is. Perhaps it's because he never gets forgiveness from anyone else, but at some point he almost seems to stop seeking it, to accept the full weight of the apocalypse, Lucifer rising, etc. as if he were the only one who had a hand in it. Anyway, this chapter is meant to address that. It's set at a vague point in season 5, probably after 5.10 "Abandon All Hope" or 5.11 "Sam, Interrupted."

The sun was not even down yet when Castiel found him on the roof of the church.

Sam had noticed the red-brick building the first night they rolled into town. A burnt-out husk, it stood amidst the fields at the edge of the little city in Iowa, bordered on three sides by expanses of black dirt and downed yellow cornstalks snapped or uprooted by the harvester, its red walls aflame with the last of the daylight. Sam had tracked it with his eyes as the Impala raced by, taking in the broken glitter of stained glass clinging to the frames of the empty windows, the paint peeling on the rough wood sign pounded into the lawn that had given over to groundcover, scrub and wild grass conquering the cracked concrete steps. He’d turned his head to keep it in view as they followed the road into town, but he hadn’t said anything when it disappeared into the lengthening darkness at their back, because he knew Dean wanted to find a motel and a bar, not necessarily in that order.

It was two days before Sam made it back to the church—two days of sleeping poorly at the town’s only motel, scouring all his usual sources in search of the next job, anything to end the layover, keep them moving forward, one step ahead of the things that were dogging their heels, always so close behind them that sometimes Sam looked up expecting to see them in the rearview mirror. Two days of Dean complaining about the beer at the only bar in town, a crumble of lumber under a slanting tin roof, but trudging off in that direction nonetheless as soon as the sky got red. Tonight Sam had walked him to the bar and then just kept walking, down the two-lane road that led out of town, until he reached the abandoned church, and found the lock already broken. In the attic an enormous round window looked out across the endless fields, the glass all gone except for dazzling blue and purple shards embedded in the frame; Sam had hoisted himself out by the eaves and moved across the splintering slate shingles in a crouch until he reached the empty bell tower in the middle of the roof. Then he’d braced one leg on either side of the peak and leaned back against the crumbling tower, staring out at the sun slowly melting into the western horizon, the clouds around it red as blood.

Sam pulled one knee up toward his chest and let his head rock back against the crimson bricks, his cell phone resting in the palm of one loose hand. He would be back at the motel long before midnight, long before his brother; he would never let Dean come back to an empty room.

“… not you anymore…”

The tinny voice emanating from the cell phone speakers almost didn’t sound like Dean’s, but it didn’t matter—Sam knew this message by heart, well enough to fill in the cadence of his brother’s tone, all the words that were just a restless mumble with the phone this far from his ear. He waited for the automated voice asking for an action, and his thumb hovered over the nine, the button he always pressed in the end to save the message for another fourteen days—but for now he pushed the four and listened to Dean’s voice replaying, a few phrases rising above the hum of early crickets to catch in his ears.

“Listen to me, you blood-sucking freak…” Sam let his eyes wander over the fields, following a flock of birds as it rose from the shining, broken cornstalks. “Always said… have to save you or kill you… fair warning—I’m done trying to save… a monster, Sam. No going back.” A breath of wind blew Sam’s bangs across his face; he brushed them away and hit the four again.

“You like high places.”

Gingerly, being careful of his balance, Sam turned his head to look at the man who had appeared behind him on the roof. Castiel’s gaze swept over the view before his eyes dropped to meet Sam’s, one pale hand braced against the crown of the bell tower. In the sunset light, his usually plain coat burned like a cinder. Sam sent the angel a small smile.

“Hey, Cas,” he greeted, readjusting his shoes in the wedges between the shingles. Then he turned back to the sinking sun, the lowest rim of that brilliant white disc just crumpling against the horizon, less and less blinding the closer it got to the ground. “Aren’t you a little early?” he joked.

Castiel frowned. He shifted a step closer and bent down until he was level with Sam, one hand tracing the groove between the dark red bricks. “I didn’t realize we had an appointment,” the angel said, his voice serious and mildly concerned.

Sam laughed under his breath. “No, we didn’t. I just meant… you usually come at night. Late, late at night, when…” Sam hesitated, then swallowed his brother’s name, shaking his head and knocking red dust onto the shoulders of his shirt. “When most people are asleep.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Sam could see the angel looking at him, a thoughtful crease bothering his forehead. “I come when you are troubled,” Castiel said simply. His piercing gaze burned against Sam’s face like a physical touch. “The nights are difficult for you,” he added in a murmur.

Sam looked down at his jeans. His hand tightened around the dark face of his cell phone, but he kept his jaw set and said nothing, and Castiel let him be, too accustomed to Sam now to expect a response. For a long moment the only sounds between them were the gathering crickets and the metallic mumble of Dean’s message repeating, the angry lifts and barks of feedback audible even through Sam’s muffling fingers. Then the automated voice was back, louder than the message itself, eternally asking what he intended to do.

“To delete this message, press seven. To save it in the archives, press nine. To hear this message again, press four.” Then came the silence, the world holding its breath, waiting for him to make a choice.

Castiel shifted beside him, the red and gold light playing across his face. “What is that?” the angel asked, gesturing to the phone with one hand.

Sam curled his fingers into a loose fist. “Nothing. Just a voicemail from a while ago.”

Castiel studied him for a moment, taking his face apart feature by feature as if he’d heard something unexpected, some evasion, in the tone of his reply. Sam tried to smile but the expression got stuck at the corners of his lips. Then the angel reached out and wrapped his hand around Sam’s, lifting the phone into the space between them, and the pressure of their joined fingers made the buttons light up. The screen flickered on again, counting the seconds of the looped recording.

“…to hear this message again, press four…”

Castiel pressed down on Sam’s thumb. As Dean’s voice spilled into the air around them, banishing the serenity of the vacant rooftop, Sam wondered if the angel had pushed the volume up, too—the words stung in his ears, louder than they had seemed in a long time.

“Listen to me, you blood-sucking freak.”

Castiel became very still. Sam tore his eyes from the phone and cast his gaze out across the mown landscape, fixing on a speck moving in the distance: a silver pickup tearing down one of the access roads between the empty fields, a cloud of golden dust roiling up from its tires. The particles ignited like sparks when they hit the horizon.

“Dad always said I’d either have to save you or kill you,” Dean’s voice told him again, brittle with rage. “Well, I’m giving you fair warning—I’m done trying to save you. You’re a monster, Sam—” Castiel’s hand almost seemed to flinch around his. “—a vampire. You’re not you anymore. And there’s no going back.”

The message cut off abruptly, leaving an unsteady silence that eddied around them, moving in patches like the wake of a boat that had departed too soon, unbalanced on the water. Sam pushed nine with the corner of his thumb. As the automated voice chirped, “Message saved for fourteen days,” Castiel released Sam’s hand, letting it sink slowly back into his lap. Then the angel rocked back on his heels, his body perfectly still in spite of the slope of the roof, slightly hunched as if his coat had become too heavy.

“Why are you keeping that, Sam?”

Sam shrugged one shoulder against the red brick tower. His shirt rasped over the mottled surface, tiny threads catching and pulling into fuzzy clumps. He thought suddenly of the pile of discarded laundry lying at the foot of his rented bed, his and Dean’s clothes, the load he’d meant to throw in the motel washing machine before heading out for the night—but Dean had already been slipping his shoes on, and Sam knew he wouldn’t wait. The sun was below the horizon now—all that remained were the thin layers of vivid clouds, glowing like they had snared scraps of the sun before it shed its molten skin on the precipice, dropped over the cold, dark edge. The truck was gone, too.

A warm hand flitted against his arm. “Sam.”

“It’s nothing, Cas,” he replied. His voice was even in the first shadows of the long autumn twilight, as quiet as the crickets that were picking up their instruments in the grass below, their song drifting up to the roof like the ring of a distant telephone, going unanswered. Castiel edged forward along the spine of the shingles until he could catch Sam’s eyes. The young hunter sighed. “It’s nothing, really. I’m just… not ready to delete it yet.”

Castiel’s eyebrows drew together. The frown settling over his lips said he wanted more, a clearer explanation, but Sam just shook his head, turning back to the fading sunset. There was so much that the angel didn’t understand at the simplest of times—it seemed impossible to explain that he had listened to that message on a park bench in the sunshine, in a gas station bathroom as Dean picked through the premade deli sandwiches, that sometimes he turned off all the sound and let it play in the darkness of their hotel rooms, staring at the seconds ticking by on the glowing screen of his cell phone, knowing by heart when to press nine again, to keep it saved. That it didn’t hurt him at all to listen to that message, but somehow he needed to feel it—the sensation that buzzed in his ears whenever he hit repeat. It felt like throwing a rock as far as he could across a still pond and then sinking with it into the deepest part of the water. There was something down there that he needed to get to.

Castiel was still staring at him—Sam could feel the intensity of that gaze on his face—and he gave a short laugh, an incredulous smile overtaking him. “It’s just something I’m hanging onto for a while—seriously. I don’t even listen to it that often,” he said, lifting his head to meet the angel’s eyes again. “Really. It’s fine, Cas.”

The nickname was light on his lips, and Castiel’s shoulders relaxed just barely under the fall of his trench coat. But the angel’s gaze stayed where it was for another long moment before dropping to the phone in Sam’s hand, all five fingers laced tight around the screen of black glass.

“That message was not from Dean,” Castiel said at last, his expression thoughtful.

Sam straightened against the bricks of the bell tower, turning to face the angel fully for the first time. He braced one hand against the collapsing red stone behind him and the roughness of the mortar line between bricks seared his fingers. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

Castiel extended his arm and ran one finger down the phone’s dark face, pausing when he reached Sam’s whitened knuckles. “When Dean was being held by the angels, before… Lilith…” The pause was barely an inhale, but somehow it echoed over the roof like so much more than a moment of silence. Castiel set his jaw and turned his hand over, smoothing his thumb across the underside of Sam’s. “Zachariah said he needed to give you one more push, to ensure you would break the final seal.” The angel’s hand tightened around his, and Sam stared at their overlapping fingers, chaotic and convoluted like the veins in a heart. Castiel shook his head. “I never knew what he meant by that. Now I do.”

Sam took a deep breath. It felt like it took forever for that inhale to reach his lungs—like it had to climb down every rung of his spine before finally sliding into the center of his chest, pushing out on his rib cage. He looked out across the fields as the soft breeze stirred at their backs, cold as a shiver as it blew through the arches in the bell tower and unsettled the film of dust on the slate shingles. The first star was glimmering in the pale pink western sky, pulsing like oncoming headlights or a distant lighthouse, the only port in a sunset storm. Sam let his exhale go.

“Wow,” he said.

Something was glowing inside of him—probably relief, he thought, that whatever they’d said to each other before or since, these words at least hadn’t come from his brother, these words that had been ringing in his ears as he’d stepped into the hallway of that convent, onto the road to Hell, armed with his good intentions. But even as the overwhelming feeling stole through him, banishing the chill of the autumn breeze, something pulled back equally hard—some impulse that constricted his fingers around the cell phone, pressed the black plastic into his palm until he could feel the headphone jack leaving a blister on his skin. He swallowed against the dryness in the back of his throat.

“Well,” he said at last, shrugging once more. “Then it really doesn’t matter.”

Castiel pulled his hand carefully back to his side, but his eyes never left the darkened screen. “You didn’t know,” the angel realized, his lips tight. Sam said nothing. The darkness of the early evening was surrounding them now, creeping up the old red walls and over the edge of the roof as Castiel shook his head. “You never asked him about the message.”

“Cas…” Sam broke in. He left the rest of the explanation unsaid; Castiel could probably fill it all in for himself at this point. Sam closed his eyes against the twilight, concentrating for a second on the throb of his own heartbeat—but he blinked them open a moment later when quiet fingers touched his face, mapping the depth of the hollows beneath his eyes. He stared back into pensive blue irises.

“How much have you been sleeping?” Castiel asked. The question was so soft that it almost disappeared, whisked away as soon as it left his lips by the subtle breeze, flooding them with the scent of dry leaves and turned dirt and the sharp coldness of night, waiting in the wings. Sam would have ignored the question entirely if the angel’s gaze hadn’t been boring into his.

“Enough,” he said. Somehow the single word made him unbelievably tired, so exhausted that if he hadn’t been leaning against the bell tower he thought he might have slipped bonelessly down the side of the roof and slumped to the ground below, nothing but a skid mark on red brick and slate. Then suddenly there was a hand on his, waking the cell phone again, one finger pressing hard against the voicemail button.

Sam blinked. “Cas, what’re you…”

“Please enter your password.”

The automated voice was shrill in the air between them, repeating the request when neither hand moved for a few long seconds. Castiel watched him as though waiting for Sam to do something—to enter the code or to stop him, Sam wasn’t sure—and then the angel turned his gaze to the phone and painstakingly entered 3-3-2-6, each tiny chirp from the buttons as loud as a train whistle in the silence—his childish password, so simple even Castiel could figure it out. The message started up again—Zachariah’s message, Sam knew now—and somehow underneath the familiar voice he thought he could hear it for the first time, all the ruthlessness and cunning that made Zachariah the thing he was most afraid of seeing in the Impala’s rearview mirror. And somehow, in spite of all of it, something inside of him lurched when Castiel covered the seven with his thumb.

“Listen to me, you bloodsucking freak—”

“Cas, wait—”

“Message deleted. End of messages.”

Sam inhaled and held it. Castiel slowly withdrew his hand from the phone, leaving an impression of warmth wherever their fingers had crossed—but he kept his steady gaze on Sam’s face, waiting as the young man’s eyes took in the glowing screen of his cell phone, the timer clicking meaninglessly on now through the automated settings loop, finally rising to meet the angel’s only once the buttons had gone dark. Then Castiel shook his head, a simple motion that was somehow so full.

“I think you’ve listened to that message enough.”

Sam dropped his eyes to his lap, swallowing to get rid of the feeling that had crawled up from his stomach. Castiel tipped his head to one side. Then the angel shifted and settled his back against the bell tower, matching Sam’s pose and stretching his legs down the roof’s spine, his shoulder coming to rest against the brick just beside his companion’s head. To Sam he looked like some immutable statue—a stone angel lounging on top of an empty church, his gravel voice quiet as the dusk. 

“I swore to Lucifer that I would never let him have you, Sam.”

Sam’s head turned at the words; he kept his expression neutral but his eyes swept over Castiel’s features, fighting to read every line by the light of the early stars. The angel looked back at him, solemn as ever. Then Castiel lifted one hand to push Sam’s hair back behind his ear, his fingers lingering for a moment in the dark brown strands.

“I am barely an angel anymore, and what power I have left is so much less than what I have lost—but I would die for you, Sam Winchester. I will kill for you. And I will not let Lucifer into your mind… whatever form he takes.”

The last of the light was gone from the sky now—darkness had taken over, and the stars were breaking through in clusters, mirroring the lights of the little city away across the fields, a knot of brightness in an otherwise dark world. Sam looked up and scanned the velvet blue dome for constellations. He’d known a lot of them once, when he and Dean had tagged along on their dad’s camping trips and had crawled out of the tent at midnight to search the sky, his older brother always eager to one-up him in picking them out. Now the only one he could remember was Dean’s favorite: Orion, the hunter. He glanced over at Castiel and wondered what the angel saw when he looked at the sky. Then he let out a heavy exhale, and reached out to touch Castiel’s hand, pressing his palm over his companion’s rough knuckles.

“I have to leave soon,” he whispered, wondering whether he was telling himself or Castiel. “It’s a long walk back.”

Castiel turned his hand over underneath Sam’s and squeezed. “I will take you back, when it is time.”

Sam thought for a moment about Dean sitting in a beat-up chair in the rundown bar, bottles lined up like bowling pins in front of him, and considered telling the angel why he wanted to get back. But somehow he had a feeling that he already knew. So he just turned his body toward Castiel and laid his head against the angel’s shoulder, pulling his knees up until they rested half across Castiel’s lap. He closed his eyes and felt an arm wrap around his back, holding him up against the gravity of the slope.

“You should ask him about it,” Castiel said, just a voice in the darkness now, his fingers steady in the folds of Sam’s shirt. “The real message he left you that day.”

Sam shook his head softly. “I can’t do that, Cas,” he murmured. He slipped his phone back into his pocket and then buried his suddenly empty hand in the liner of the angel’s coat, the beige fabric soft as corn silk on his skin. He breathed in the scents that always lingered around Castiel, clean water and candle smoke. “As long as I don’t know for sure, it could have said anything. It could have said that… he forgives me.”

Castiel rested his cheek against the top of Sam’s head. “You are long forgiven,” he whispered back.

Sam knew that he couldn’t believe something like that. But somehow, nonetheless, those words made him warm all the way through, and he leaned into Castiel’s embrace with a little smile on his lips, content to let someone else hold him up, just for a moment.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter, the second to last, is set late in season 5, probably between "99 Problems" and "Point of No Return," but not closely attached to either episode. Image song for this chapter is "Saints and Angels" by Sara Evans.

Castiel always seemed to know, somehow, which nights were the worst.

Sam Winchester sat on the edge of the unmade bed with his elbows braced against his knees, resting his head on his clasped hands. The hotel room was dark—the impenetrable dark of two in the morning—the numbers on the digital clock face the only things that had moved in a long time. The air reeked of sweat and disinfectant, but Sam thought he was the only one who had noticed. Dean’s clothes were all over the floor, trailing in a disorganized line from the door to their carelessly dropped backpacks, and the nightstand between their beds was littered with crushed beer cans and an empty whiskey bottle, a splash of golden liquid solidifying into amber on the scratched tabletop. But those had been empty since the afternoon; they weren’t the reason Dean was passed out in one bed with his belt still cinched around his waist and his shirt only half unbuttoned, or the reason Sam was sitting silently in the dark on the other, his head in his hands.

The Coke machine was broken.

That had been Dean’s original excuse for going out to a bar—not that they sold beer in Coke machines. But then, Dean didn’t need much of an excuse these days. It didn’t matter that he’d ordered a Guinness with lunch at the greasy diner-slash-convenience-store three blocks from their hotel and then brought a six-pack back with them and finished two-thirds of it in an hour, crunching the empty cans under the heel of his boot with a snap that made Sam jump every time, his laptop bouncing on his knees. It didn’t matter that he’d washed it down with the whiskey they always kept in the glove box, more for first aid than for sport. Nothing mattered except that the Coke machine was broken, and that Sam was sitting up in the dark listening to his brother breathe into his pillow because some part of him was terrified Dean would stop.

Drinking made Dean better or worse depending on how much he had, and why he was doing it. First came the high—where Dean had been that night when he’d dragged Sam out to the bar with him, putting down twice as much as his brother even before Sam stopped drinking. The high was a lopsided grin and an arm hooked too tight around Sam’s neck, jerking their shoulders together. But in the end he always got angry, if he drank enough—and that was where Dean had been when he’d shoved Sam into the hotel door and cracked his skull against the metal frame, bursting past his crumpled brother into the room.

Get your hands off me, Sam, Dean had growled, wrenching the zipper open on his short leather jacket. I can get my own damn clothes off.

Sam rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyes, then stared out across the room through his blurry fingers. The way Dean’s things were flung around was like a timeline of their return—Dean’s jacket bunched up on the back of a chair, his wallet thrown down beside the TV remote, one shoe kicked under the air conditioner; his other shoe and both socks laid out carefully at the foot of his bed, where Sam had put them after peeling them from his older brother’s unconscious feet. Moonlight cut through the window blinds and landed in stripes across Dean’s back, whitewashing all of the restless creases out of his comforter, erasing the scars from the knuckles of the hand beside his head. Sam knew they were still there, though—just like he knew the angry bruise blossoming on Dean’s other hand hadn’t disappeared when he’d turned off the lights.

Dean, I can help, he’d tried to say, pushing himself away from the door and reaching out for his brother as he blinked the black spots out of his eyes. Dean stepped back out of his reach.

Oh, help? Yeah, that’s great, Sammy—like you helped Lucifer escape from Alcatraz? You always have to help everybody, don’t you? You know what, just lay off—you’ve done enough. Dean struggled out of the sleeves of his jacket and shoved it onto the back of a chair inside out, rounding on Sam with bloodshot eyes. Swear to God, some days, if I didn’t know they’d bring us right back I’d put a bullet in both our heads. He kicked his left shoe off and it flew across the room to crash against the air conditioner. Then he whirled and drove his fist down into the center of the table. His shocked fingers unclenched sharply as he ripped his hand away. Fuck! Dean had shouted loud enough to rattle the cardboard walls. Then he’d collapsed over the far bed and yanked the comforter up to his ears, leaving Sam standing in the wake of the hurricane, adrift and discarded just like everything else.

Sam cradled his head and leaned forward on his elbows, rocking back and forth on the edge of the mattress. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. This was one of the bad nights, meaning Dean would be up and down until daybreak, stumbling to the bathroom to heave up his stomach before plunging back into bed with an aching head. Which was why Sam was sitting up on the bed next to his brother’s, a glass of water and a bottle of Excedrin squeezed onto the nightstand in between twisted beer cans, and just waiting. Why his head was in his hands was a little more complicated.

For once the world was so quiet that he heard the flutter of arriving wings.

“Sam.”

Sam didn’t bother to look up. The angel had appeared right in front of him this time; even staring down at the floor he could see the edge of a familiar beige trench coat. “Hey, Cas,” he tried to say—but he hadn’t said anything in hours, and the words came out as a croak, less a greeting than a rasped invocation of the angel’s name. Speaking brought the taste of cheap beer back into his mouth even though he’d already brushed his teeth three times. It made him want to gag.

Castiel’s feet shifted against the scuffed linoleum floor. “What’s wrong?” he asked, a touch of deadly seriousness darkening his tone. Sam bit his lip. After a moment, the angel amended, “What happened?” Then his name, “Sam?” as if to make sure the question couldn’t die. It reminded Sam of the way their father had spoken whenever he and Dean were in trouble, seizing the collar of Sam’s ill-fitting hand-me-downs and lifting the boy’s toes off the ground until reluctant hazel eyes fixed on his, detecting any lies in Sam’s twitching lips before his second son had even attempted them. It wasn’t until middle school that Sam got good at lying to John Winchester’s face.

“Sam?” Castiel’s tone was shorter now, something like worry creeping through the name.

Sam swallowed a miserable laugh and shook his head from side to side. His father was the last person he wanted to think about right now; the two angry drunks in his life were just a little too similar sometimes.

“What happened,” he repeated, turning his face up to Castiel for the first time. The angel looked the way he always did—tired, desperate, just a little ruffled—but his eyes seemed darker tonight, focused on Sam with nervous urgency. Sam shrugged his heavy shoulders. “We went out. Dean got drunk. He got in a fight with the table, and… now he’s sleeping it off. But he’s fine, Cas—he just had too much.”

Castiel sent a sideways glance at the table across the room, his eyebrows drawing thoughtfully together—but the angel was getting better at reading him, or else Sam was just too tired to try tonight, because the evasion only threw him off for a moment, and those intense blue eyes returned to Sam’s face after only a cursory examination of the furniture. Castiel shook his head once.

“That isn’t what I meant,” the angel told him. His voice was soft, but those eyes were unyielding, refusing to release Sam’s gaze. “It’s clear that your brother has poisoned himself again. I want to know what happened to you.” Castiel lifted one hand and pressed it gently to the back of Sam’s head, over the lump that had been throbbing ever since he’d picked himself up from the doorway—and in spite of the caution of his touch, Sam couldn’t stop himself from wincing. Castiel’s neutral expression slid into a frown. “You’ve been injured,” he said.

His fingers were warm in Sam’s hair. Somehow that warmth just made him shiver, trickling down his spine like an uncoiling spider web. Sam leaned back into the angel’s palm and half-closed his eyes in quiet defeat. “It’s nothing, Cas. Just a goose egg.”

“What does that mean?” his visitor asked, deathly serious as always.

Sam couldn’t really get the smile to rise to his lips; he settled for clearing his throat softly. “It’s just a bump,” he clarified. He reached up and covered the angel’s hand with his own, tracing the ridges of Castiel’s knuckles with his thumb, and found himself wondering if Castiel had scars on his hands, too. “I banged my head on the doorframe, that’s all. It was an accident.”

Castiel’s sharp eyes flickered across his face. The angel considered him momentarily, then tilted his head just enough to glance back at Dean crumpled in the next bed, and something about his expression made Sam suddenly glad that Dean was fast asleep. He gave Castiel’s hand a long squeeze, silently begging him to let it go; the angel’s jaw tightened, but ultimately he turned back to Sam without calling his lie, focusing intently on the young hunter’s face. He brushed uncertain fingertips against Sam’s swollen skull.

“I’m sorry I can’t take this away,” he murmured.

Sam knew what he meant. He knew what remained of Castiel’s grace was tattered inside of him, flickering like a ripped battle flag, barely strong enough now to open his wings. But somehow the warm touch of his hand was soothing all the same, and Sam felt the throbbing in his head subside, fading to nothing but a dull, background ache. He nodded up at the angel and managed a small smile.

“It’s okay. Honestly, it feels better already.”

Castiel didn’t answer. He let the silence hold them for a long moment, looking down at Sam with an unreadable expression. From beyond the window came a flare of drunken laughter, women’s voices stumbling through the deserted parking lot, the unmistakable sound of a bottle smashing against the wall. The heavy blinds creaked together and cut new lines over Dean’s back, slicing him into a black-and-white jigsaw puzzle. Then Castiel’s hand slipped out of Sam’s hair and back to his side. The ghost of his warmth tingled on the young man’s skin.

“You should be resting, too,” the angel said.

His voice was light, but somehow the words felt like hundreds of bricks falling onto Sam’s shoulders—or maybe that was just the weight of the world again, reminding him that it hadn’t gone anywhere. Suddenly it was all he could do to hold himself upright on the edge of the bed. Sam dragged both hands down his face and blinked unfocused eyes at the air conditioner across the room, Dean’s discarded shoe with its tangled midnight laces, and then slumped down to rest his elbows on his knees again.

“Yeah, I…” He broke off and lifted one hand in a sort of half gesture, toward Dean or the clock or the bathroom, or maybe all three. “I will, it’s just… Dean’s going to be up sick in an hour, and I don’t want him to have to sit up alone.”

“Like you are,” Castiel said.

Sam turned away. He pressed his lips together and stared at Castiel’s reflection in the dark screen of the hotel TV. He was only an outline on the empty glass, insubstantial as a camera flash, a fuzzy impression of white on black. The vague image hid the pits above the angel’s cheekbones, the lines at the corners of his eyes. Sam glanced at Dean again, the shadows that had smoothed his features out, made his expression serene, almost happy. Sam stared down at the floor. The darkness hid a lot on all of them.

Castiel sighed. Somehow Sam knew the angel was looking at the figure in the other bed, one thumb hooked against the pocket of his trench coat. “I can… put him further down, so that he won’t wake—”

“No.” Sam jerked his head up and caught Castiel’s eyes, holding the angel’s confused, reluctant gaze for just a moment before he turned back to the floor. He traced the edges of the linoleum tiles with one socked foot. “Thanks, Cas, but—he’ll be sicker in the morning if he doesn’t get it out of his system tonight.” Castiel said nothing, and Sam bit his lip, adding under his breath, “Besides, I… I want to be here for him. I want to take care of him right now.” He shook his head, and the movement made his skull throb again. “It’s the least I can do for him, after everything.”

The angel’s feet shifted. “After what, Sam?” he asked—and Sam wasn’t sure, because it was so hard to tell with that low, gravel voice, but Castiel almost sounded angry, and he thought that if he’d looked up he might have found those intense blue eyes narrowed, his jaw solemn as stone. Sam kept his gaze on the floor.

“Look, it’s just…” He ran a hand through his hair, clenching the strands into a ponytail for a second at the back of his neck before they slipped through his fingers. “Dean’s seen me a lot worse than this—tripping on demon blood, and losing it, and…” Sam hesitated as his gaze caught on a splash of silver—the last two cans from the six-pack, twisted until they’d split and thrown under the edge of Dean’s bed. Somehow the sight of them made his chest constrict until it was hard to breathe. His exhale took forever to leave his lungs. “He thinks he needs this, Cas, and I just want to… this is the only thing I can do for him.”

Castiel was silent for a full minute, letting the words hang like smoke in the air between them; Sam thought he might have seen them physically hovering there if he’d looked at the TV again. When at last the angel did speak, his voice was so quiet that Sam could barely decipher it. Somehow that didn’t make the words sting any less.

“He poisons both of you when he does this.”

Sam’s breath caught in his throat. For an instant he closed his mind, taking in only the things that didn’t matter—the blare of a car alarm outside and the moonlight breaking on the linoleum floor, the rustle of Castiel’s trench coat as the angel resettled his wings. The glint of silver cans blurring as he blinked too fast. Then he dropped his head back down against his clasped hands and closed his eyes, remembering when he used to sit on the edge of thousands of mattresses just like this and pray. It felt like a long time ago.

“You know, maybe you should take off for tonight, Cas,” he said into his fingers. He kept his voice steady even though it felt like a butterfly was dying in his throat, its wings rasping against the breathing walls with each desperate beat. Sam shook his head. “Dean’s going to be up and down, and… I’m not going to be much company.”

Sam practically felt Castiel’s shoulders tense. The room was suddenly too cold, even though the window had been closed all night and it was summer outside. He bit down on the urge to shudder. A hand brushed against his arm, sudden and disconcerting in the blind darkness; Sam flinched, and the hand disappeared just as quickly, though the brief touch left his muscle aching as if from a deep wound. He waited in the maddening silence for the flicker of wings. Then the linoleum creaked, and Castiel came into view again as he knelt in front of Sam, his blue eyes searching the young man’s face. Sam pressed his trembling lips together.

“I upset you,” Castiel said.

Sam shook his head shortly, his gaze dropping to the knees of his worn-out jeans. He tried hard not to blink. “No, it’s not… you’re fine, Cas, it’s just… he needs to be taken care of sometimes, too,” he managed to get out, the words breathless and rough as his callused hands, which had fallen to his sides and fisted in the sheets. He choked on something and hoped it was just a breath. “He doesn’t even realize how much he needs someone to take care of him.”

Castiel shifted in his kneel, the motion somehow thoughtful. Then he reached up and cupped the sides of Sam’s face with both hands, gently lifting the young man’s head until he could catch those reluctant hazel eyes. Sam’s vision was getting blurry, smearing the elements of the hotel room together, and in the radiance from the window Castiel looked more like an angel than he had in a long time, the moonlight rippling around him in a hazy glow, his eyes an impossibly pale blue. Castiel sighed and the exhale brushed his face.

“Who will take care of you, Sam?” he asked.

Sam squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t stop the tears from slipping down his cheeks now, one after another; Castiel wiped them away with his thumbs, each soft graze of contact throbbing like dull fire under Sam’s skin. Sam fought to breathe quietly, to keep his body still, but his arms wouldn’t stop trembling—he brought one quivering hand up to cover Castiel’s, curling his fingers over the angel’s. Then there was a voice in the room, a shaky, splintered one, and Sam realized it was his, barely a whisper in the haunting darkness.

“Dean takes care of me,” he said. He opened his eyes and battled down the lump in his throat, staring back at Castiel through damp eyelashes. “In his own way. He just… he’s had a hard year and…”

Castiel tipped his head to one side, watching him, and though he said nothing Sam felt that there was something inexplicably sad about his expression, a twinge of remorse for something done so long ago that putting it right was impossible. Then the angel lifted his unburdened hand and pulled Sam into him, folding the young man forward until Sam’s head rested in the hollow of his shoulder, his body cradled in the curve of Castiel’s. Sam blinked against the fabric of the trench coat as the angel’s arms crossed over his back, crushing him down into the embrace. For a second all he could do was breathe, one shuddering inhale after another. Then he unclenched his fingers from the bed sheets and wrapped his own arms around Castiel—and even though they were shaking he held on as tightly as he could, gripping his shoulders, fisting both hands in the other man’s sleeves. His eyes flickered open and settled for an instant on Dean’s back, his body turned away from them in the other bed, his sleeping fingers stretched out as if toward the empty whiskey bottle on the nightstand. But then Sam forced them closed and buried his face in a warmer shoulder, and thought only of Castiel—Castiel holding him up, Castiel’s hand smoothing back his hair, Castiel breathing softly across his neck. He thought about Castiel and leaned into the hug, shaking his head against the angel’s coat.

“Why’re you doing this for me, Cas?” he asked hoarsely. “You didn’t have to do this.”

Castiel’s hand stilled in his hair. All motion between them ceased in an instant, except for Sam’s expanding and contracting lungs and the beating of his heart, too loud in his own ears. The angel was quiet so long Sam wondered if he had fallen asleep and this was all a dream, one without sound. Then Castiel’s gravel voice rose up out of the darkness, soft as a sigh, as simple and secure as the arms Sam was tangled in.

“Because I want to take care of you.”

There was a funny feeling inside of Sam, like he had swallowed a handful of feathers and they were dancing in his stomach. For some reason it made him smile. He sank into the angel’s body, every muscle relaxing except his fingers, knitted into the heavy tan fabric of Castiel’s coat.

“Thanks, Cas,” he whispered into the angel’s collar.

Castiel rested one hand against the back of his neck. “I will wait with you,” he said.

Sam wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to. He wanted to tell Castiel that he was okay waiting up for Dean by himself, that this was far from the first time he’d faced the darkness alone. But somehow he couldn’t make his hands let go of that coat. The fraying fragments of Castiel’s grace reached up and enfolded him in brilliant yellow light, flickering on his skin like the battered feathers of colossal broken wings, and Sam wanted to tell the angel that he didn’t need that, either—that he was warm enough just being where he was, wrapped up in Castiel in a bright spot in a dark hotel room. But in the end he didn’t say anything. He just leaned into the angel and let himself go, trusting Castiel to keep him from falling.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the final chapter of this story; thanks to all who read and gave their support. One reviewer had the idea of a sequel following season 6, which is an interesting one, but I'll have to consider whether that's something I could write. In any case, I hope this wraps up the story well, and that it is enjoyable to read.
> 
> This chapter is set between episodes 5.21 "Two Minutes to Midnight" and 5.22 "Swan Song;" specifically, it's meant to take place at the beginning of Swan Song before Dean walks out into the salvage yard to talk to Sam.

Sam wandered through the heaps of wrecked cars and loose tires that filled the front yard of Singer Salvage, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his worn-out jeans. Everywhere the midafternoon sun glinted on rusted hoods and the cracks in split windshields, creating little sparkles of light that raced ahead of him through the yard, jumping from one totaled vehicle to the next. His tennis shoes lifted a haze of dust every time he took a step, and it followed him doggedly through the auto yard, the bodies of old nails shifting under his heels.

It was warm enough that he’d left his heavy jacket on the back porch, slung around the shoulders of a beat-up deck chair and keeping company with a half-full beer on the slanted wire table, the bottle wet with condensation—a picture of temporary absence, just enough to tell anybody who might wonder that he’d be back soon, had only left the porch to obey a sudden impulse to get out from under the shadow of the overhang and soak up the sunshine. 

Sam ran his hand across the nose of a grungy Pontiac and left a smudged print in the layers of long-settled grit, then wiped his fingers off on his green button-down. He caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye and turned to look at a neighboring Ford, coming face to face with his transparent reflection, which had been following him through the lot in the glass of each successive car. Sam smiled at the insubstantial version of himself floating like a ghost in the 4x4’s backseat window.

Somehow the image pulled an old memory into his head, playing hide-and-seek in the yard once with Dean and hiding in the rear tire well of a sedan with no front wheels—the ringing in his ears after Bobby had yelled himself hoarse warning them to stay out of the wrecks, pitching them both back into the house by the collars of their shirts, the backs of their skulls stinging from the older hunter’s hand. Sam shook his head at his younger self, the undisputed king of junkyard hide-and-seek. But he was still smiling as he looked out across the sea of broken cars—because it was a happy memory now, in retrospect, and because he was surprised how nostalgic even the salvage yard could be, the dinosaur boneyard that had surrounded Bobby’s house as long as he could remember. But then, everything seemed nostalgic to him, now that he had made up his mind.

The soft crunch of gravel behind him betrayed the presence of approaching steps.

“I was looking for you,” Castiel said.

Sam wasn’t used to it yet—hearing the angel’s footsteps. Somehow Castiel seemed to be able to sneak up on him even more easily now than when he’d just appeared wherever he chose at will. Dean said this was because Cas was a fucking ninja and was using all his angelic stealth tricks to get the jump on them, even though they were all on the same crappy side. But Sam thought it was just because some part of him never stopped expecting to hear the rustle of the angel refolding his wings. That sound was so integral to Castiel that he didn’t seem quite complete without it.

Sam turned halfway to glance over his shoulder, smiling at the angel who looked as out of place in the middle of Bobby’s automotive jungle as he had fast asleep on the couch the night before, his trench coat wrapped tight around him in place of a blanket. Sam had tiptoed downstairs for a glass of water somewhere after midnight and had stood at the foot of the couch for a while, studying the weary lines of the not-quite-angel’s face through the darkness of the closed blinds—then he’d set his empty cup in the sink and silently ascended the stairs again, the decision he’d made sitting a little more heavily in his stomach.

Castiel was staring at him oddly—Sam had been quiet too long, he realized, lost in his own thoughts. The angel took a step closer to him, his black shoes lifting the dust to swirl around his feet. Sam wondered if his shoes had ever done that before. “Why did you come out here?” Castiel asked, his considering eyes moving past Sam and over the piles of mangled rubber and pierced metal, as though trying to gauge what could have drawn the young man away from the shaded porch. Sam ran a hand through his hair, pushing his bangs back over the crown of his head.

“No reason,” he said. He shrugged with one shoulder, wiggling a tarnished nail out of the soil with the tip of his shoe and twisting it back and forth. “Just taking a look around.”

Castiel’s perceptive gaze swung back to Sam’s face, those intense blue eyes scrutinizing his expression. “Saying goodbye?” the angel asked quietly.

Sam turned to stare out over the salvage graveyard once more, his back to Castiel. A little breeze brushed past him, flicking a few strands of hair against his cheeks and diminishing for a minute the steady throb of the sun, almost uncomfortably warm on the shoulders of his corduroy shirt. He stood still for a moment longer, toggling the nail with the toe of his sneaker. Then he moved forward a few strides and braced his foot on the front bumper of an old black Volkswagen, and rolled up onto the searing hood, pulling his knees up and resting his back against the chipped windshield. The heat of the metal burned his palms, but the feeling receded as he pressed both hands against his jeans. Soon he could only feel the throbbing in his fingertips.

“My dad used to bring me and Dean here sometimes,” Sam found himself saying as he slumped into the glass. “When we were little, I mean. Sometimes when the hunt was too dangerous, or he didn’t have anywhere to stash us close by. Dean always wanted to stay with Dad, but…” He laughed under his breath, staring down at the hands splayed against his knees. “I wanted to come here all the time. I loved it here.”

Somehow the past tense made the words too heavy; they didn’t disappear after he’d said them, but settled like sinking stones onto the hood of the car beside him, onto the peeling black paint so flaked that the metal was almost gray again. The darkness Sam thought he had left behind on the shady porch rose up in the corner of his eye. He could see his reflection in the skewed rearview mirror of the ancient Bronco parked in front of the Volkswagen, but somehow his face looked different, wrong, as though something else were just wearing his skin. Sam looked down at his hands. Without noticing he had clenched them around his knees; his white knuckles stood out like bone against the dark blue denim.

Footsteps on the gravel again. Castiel moved forward until he stood even with Sam, staring across the salvage yard with unseeing blue eyes.

“I’m sorry,” the angel said, so softly that Sam almost missed it. Castiel looked down and shifted one foot, regarding the dust on the toes of his shoes. “I wish I could offer you peace—now, of all times. But I don’t have anything to give.”

Sam glanced over at his resigned companion. Castiel was concentrating on a place in the distance, a mound of tangled cars braced against the outer wall of Bobby’s overflowing lot; something flared inside the angel, like a candle catching a flicker of wind, and Sam felt a brief flash of the brilliant yellow light that had washed over him so many times in Castiel’s arms—but then it was gone, the divine spark inside the angel dimmer than ever, and Castiel’s shoulders fell, the trench coat rippling weakly around him. Castiel shook his head.

“I am… running on empty,” he finished, enunciating carefully the words Sam was sure had been thrown out first by his brother. He couldn’t help wondering if they’d been accompanied by an admonishment of how useless Castiel was to them without his angelic powers—Dean’s anger made him cruel sometimes.

Castiel didn’t say anything else, just stared out at the broken-down cars; Sam wasn’t great at reading the angel’s face, but to him it looked like Castiel was trying to find a place out there for himself, one more wreck to be abandoned in that endless pile of bones. Sam hadn’t seen such a lost expression anywhere but the mirror lately. He sat up from the windshield and rested his weight against his knees, then reached out and pressed his hand to the sleeve of the familiar trench coat. The touch brought Castiel’s eyes back to find his, and Sam gave him a half smile, squeezing the angel’s shoulder.

“You know, Cas, the times that you’ve come to see me… I mean, at night…”

Sam broke off and worked his tongue against his teeth. Out in the middle of all those smashed vehicles, under the sunshine, the memories almost didn’t seem real, just figments of dreams that had kept him alive in the darkness. But Castiel was watching him intently, waiting, so Sam sighed and shook his head, meeting once more those striking blue eyes.

“It’s not just your grace that helps. You know that, right?”

Castiel frowned a little, his eyebrows drawing together. “Grace was the only thing I had to give you.”

“No, Cas, that’s not true.” The angel tipped his head to one side, and Sam shrugged again, biting his lip. “What really helps is that you… you stay with me. You talk to me. Sometimes about things that no one else will.”

Castiel pressed his lips together into a thin line. Sam looked down. One finger at a time he forced his free hand to relax against his jeans, watched the color flowing back into his knuckles. A mirage of heat was rising from the car hood beneath him, and the evaporating particles singed his arms right through his long sleeves. He let out the breath he’d been holding and nodded at his knees.

“I think I can do it, Cas.” The angel didn’t answer, so Sam forced himself to nod again, the way he had nodded at the dark bathroom mirror at the top of the stairs as the watch on his wrist beeped one a.m., his features so distorted it had looked like someone else nodding at him through the glass. Sam dragged a fingernail down the seam of his jeans. “I can take him back down—into the cage.”

Castiel shifted, the gravel hissing under his shoes. “This isn’t a choice I would ever have considered,” he said under his breath.

Sam shook his head. “It’s not a choice at all. It’s just the only shot we’ve got left.”

Castiel was quiet for a moment. Sam withdrew his hand from the other man’s shoulder and fisted it into his opposite sleeve, curling around his knees. As he moved, he noticed that Castiel’s left hand had risen to rest on the hood of the car beside him, still as granite. He wondered if the flaking metal burned the angel’s skin, too.

“What will your brother say?” Castiel asked at last.

Sam let his head flop back until he was staring up at the sky, the fading trails of airplanes the only clouds that scarred that vast expanse of blue. They were fading so fast that they looked like shooting stars. “He won’t like it,” Sam admitted, his voice calm, “but he’ll accept it.” His gaze fell back to his knees and he nodded shortly, blinking hard because the brightness of the sky had made his eyes wet. “Dean always gives in eventually,” he finished in a murmur.

Castiel turned his head to look at him, hunched on the hood of the car. Sam did his best to relax his shoulders, to let the tension slide out of his body—just as he’d practiced the night before in the dark mirror, unclenching his fists, aiming an invisible smile at his own silhouette. It wasn’t what he wanted—the concern. The doubt.

“Sam,” Castiel started.

Sam couldn’t stop himself from digging his fingernails into his knees. “I can end it, Cas,” he promised. He wondered when his voice had gotten so dry that it chapped his lips just to speak. “This is the only play. And I know I opened the box, but I have a chance to close it here. That’s all I want—a chance to set things right.”

Somehow the words left him breathless; Sam closed his mouth and tried to swallow, finding his eyes suddenly locked on Castiel’s. The angel stared back at him as though weighing his words, and once again there was something pained about his expression, something that refused to rise to the surface and become any more than a vague impression of sadness. Then Castiel lifted his hand from the hood of the car and pressed the backs of his fingers to Sam’s cheek, the warmth of the sun-battered metal pulsing on his skin.

“You don’t deserve Hell, Sam,” he said, holding those hazel eyes with his own. “Don’t tell yourself you deserve it. Don’t let anyone tell you that.”

Sam tried to smile but the expression wouldn’t stay on his face. He looked down at the patches of black paint under his shoes.

“It’s fine, Cas,” he managed, even as the angel’s touch disappeared from his face. He heard a rustle and his heart jumped into his throat—but it was just Castiel’s trench coat settling as his arm fell back to his side, his left hand smoothed flat over the long tan pocket.

The afternoon silence slipped between them, so heavy it seemed almost impossible that it would ever lift. Sam tried to trace the rust spirals on the car’s hood with his eyes, but looking down made his vision blur, so in the end he gazed out across the salvage yard again, mapping the flat planes of truck beds and the clumsy rise and fall of boxy old-fashioned sedans, the dirt glittering between their wheels with the shimmer of decades of broken glass. The light breeze stirred from its rest in the hollow bodies of the cars, rearranging Sam’s hair around his face and shaking a black plastic trash bag taped over the window of a far-off Cadillac. It reminded Sam of the flutter of startled wings, and he smiled, unable to keep himself from glancing at Castiel. The angel was looking in the same direction, but his eyes were unfocused, like he was seeing straight down into the fire—or the other way, maybe, whatever was up there. Sam rubbed one hand over the bone of his kneecap.

“Dean used to tell me there was no such thing as angels,” he said finally. He kept the little smile on his face as Castiel turned to face him, his lips slightly parted as though in surprise. Sam’s shrug pulled his shoulders up to his ears. “When I met you, I wasn’t sure, but…” He broke off, then dredged up a real smile for Castiel and rolled his head to one side, holding the angel’s eyes. “I’m really glad he was wrong.”

Castiel opened his mouth and then closed it again soundlessly. It was the first time Sam could ever remember the angel being uncertain of his words, and the humanness of that stumble was so bittersweet that he had to swallow against it, wondering for a second if that was the way it was going to be from now on—if Castiel would get more and more human one gesture at a time, while he was somewhere else, becoming anything but human. Sam wished he could be there to see it and wished it would never happen all at the same moment. Then he wrestled those thoughts down into the pit of his stomach, where he couldn’t hear them, and focused on the taste in his mouth, something that wasn’t entirely sad but definitely wasn’t happy stinging the back of his throat.

Castiel didn’t say anything for a long moment, but his gaze stayed on his companion’s face, and to Sam it looked like the angel was turning something over in his mind, revisiting a decision he’d made over and over again. The wind swirled past them in a rush of sand, laden with the smell of baking rubber. Then the angel released a slow exhale and dropped his eyes to the Volkswagen’s silver bumper.

“Do you remember the first night I came to comfort you?” Castiel asked.

The memory rose up in Sam like a tidal wave—the warped glass of a cold window, the mosaic of light and shadow on the angel’s face, the crush of yellow light soaring through him as he sank into Castiel’s arms. He hadn’t even woken up when Dean returned to the hotel room, however many hours later; the warmth of the angel’s embrace had stayed with him long after Castiel himself vanished, and it had kept him under, somewhere warm and wonderful. Just the memory of that feeling made his hands tingle. Sam felt his lips twitching up at the corners.

“Yeah, of course I remember,” he said.

Castiel’s hand flickered out to touch the hood of the car, then withdrew back to his side, like a butterfly unsettled by the light wind. The angel lifted his head and caught Sam’s gaze. “That wasn’t truly the first time.”

Sam blinked. “What does that mean?” he asked, creases of confusion bothering his forehead.

Castiel’s shoulders sagged. “Sometimes when you were a child, I would…” Sam whipped around to face the angel, surprise and disbelief waiting in his eyes—Castiel must have seen them there, because he turned away, staring out across the wasteland of broken cars. “Sometimes when I was on Earth I would hear this… voice reaching out for something—for me or something like me. A child’s voice. And it was so… desperate that sometimes I would…” Castiel broke off and looked down at his shoes, at the scatter of nails and broken glass pressed like paving stones into the dirt. “I would come to you and let you fall asleep.”

Even the soft breeze had stopped breathing. Sam stared at his companion with his mouth slightly open, his mind struggling to make sense of his words—not to believe, because Castiel never lied, even when he should—but just to understand, to make this revelation line up with the life he’d been living for almost twenty-seven years. He scoured his mind for any hint of memory, any trace of brilliant yellow light in his childhood recollections, the rustle of merciful wings in any one of a thousand extended-stay hotel rooms. But he came up empty.

Castiel’s eyes flickered to his face. “Say something,” the angel asked.

Sam shook his head, the edge of an uncertain laugh brushing his exhale. “Cas, I don’t know what to… how many times?” he amended after a second, sitting up straighter on the nose of the car.

Castiel nodded to himself. “Only a few. Four… five times.” A thoughtful look came over the angel’s face, as if he were checking the count in his head, reviewing every memory of resting his fingers against the forehead of a knobby-kneed, brown-haired boy who was short for his age—Sam watched his shifting expression and wished with an intensity that made his ribs ache that he could see those memories, too, even just one. Then he realized what he really wanted to ask, and he squeezed his arms around his legs, clearing his throat to get Castiel’s attention.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked softly.

Castiel tipped his head back. “I didn’t realize at first,” he answered simply, lifting one hand to adjust the knot of the tie around his neck. Against the dark silk his pale fingers looked completely white. “Understand, Sam, when I used to come to you at night, I didn’t even know your name. You were just… a voice.” Castiel’s gaze slipped away from his to regard the sky, and his eyes narrowed, as though he were listening for the roar of a distant airplane, too far away to be anything but a trembling vibration in his ears. “But one night, some months ago, I recognized something about you. The way you pray… without knowing it.” Sam blinked and the angel shook his head, his lips compressed into a grim line. “Once I did realize… I was not certain you would want to know.”

“Why?” Sam asked, unable to keep the crackle of desperation out of his voice.

Castiel turned to Sam and pinned his gaze, those stark blue eyes almost searing in their intensity. “Many bad things happened to you during that time, Sam,” Castiel told him, his eyebrows drawn together as if in pain, his gravel voice so low it seemed hoarse. “Things I did not stop. I only ever gave you rest.” The angel cast his eyes out over the mangled husks of all the salvaged wrecks and Sam wondered suddenly if the expression he’d been struggling to pinpoint was regret, stitched into Castiel’s features like a deep ache. He didn’t think angels were supposed to regret anything. Castiel smoothed his hands down the fall of his coat. “I thought you might resent me for that,” he finished.

Sam surprised himself with a vehement shake of his head. “Cas, no—never. I get it. You were just doing—”

“As I was told,” Castiel cut in, sending him a sidelong glance. Somehow the angel’s voice sounded almost wry, riddled with a deeply self-deprecating humor. “Having now chosen not to do as I’m told, I find myself questioning many of the times when I did.”

Sam breathed out slowly. He let one leg roll down to rest flat against the hood of the car, bracing his heel on the bumper and pivoting so that he could face Castiel more easily. The angel stayed where he was. Sam bounced his foot lightly against the dented silver bar. “I was going to say you were doing what you could,” he told Castiel, his hand flickering up from his knee, palm open, as if pleading or pacifying.

A fleeting smile touched Castiel’s lips; the angel shook his head once, and then lifted his gaze to meet Sam’s, the look in his eyes for once almost gentle as he scanned the young man’s features. “Semantics,” he said quietly. Then he tipped his head to one side, an earnest and somehow apologetic expression conquering his face. “Still, I felt you needed to know.” Castiel reached out and covered Sam’s hand where it lay against the blistering metal of the hood, and Sam felt his throat tightening as the angel’s thumb soothed the creases from the ridges of his fingers. “Whatever good it did or did not accomplish,” Castiel said, “there were always angels watching over you, Sam Winchester.”

Sam stared down at his companion for a moment, blinking hard to fight the pressure behind his eyes. Then he slid from the hood of the car and threw his arms around Castiel, surging into the hug with everything he had. Castiel’s startled arms wrapped instinctively around his back, his muscles tense with surprise—but Sam just held on as tightly as he could and pushed his face into the shoulder of that familiar trench coat, listening to the pulse pounding in his ears and pressing into Castiel until their edges blurred.

In a moment the angel had relaxed against him, and lifted both hands, slowly rubbing Sam’s back—trying to compensate, Sam realized suddenly, for the grace that had left him little by little. But he didn’t need to, because that same beautiful yellow light was rising up around Sam already, and now he knew for sure that it was just Cas—that was just how it felt to be folded in his embrace, as close as anyone had ever been to Castiel’s beating heart. So Sam laid his head sideways onto the angel’s shoulder and let Castiel hold him, and closed his eyes, content just to feel—the sun-warmed fabric of the trench coat under his hands, the whisper of Castiel’s fingers running up and down his back, the distant thrum of an airplane vibrating in his ear.

He wanted to say thank you, for everything he remembered and everything he didn’t, but he thought Castiel probably already knew what it meant to him. So he just held still and breathed everything in, the yard and the sunlight and Castiel, and promised himself he would take this memory with him, when it was time to fall.

“I think you’re wrong, Cas,” Sam whispered into his shoulder, squeezing the angel as tightly as he could. “I think you do have some grace left.”

Castiel pressed his cheek to the top of Sam’s head. “I would give it to you,” he whispered back.

Sam just smiled.


End file.
